by Jamie Duncan
“O-oh-kay,” he told himself shakily. “What say we get a grip?” He looked around the chamber. He was alone. “I’m Daniel…” Eyes roaming the empty room, he waited as though for someone to contradict him. “I’m Daniel Jackson and I have a snake in my head.” The matter-of-fact tone of it seemed to help a little, except that his hand started clawing at the skin at the nape of his neck again, and he had to physically restrain it with the other. “And I’m… talking.” Again, he waited, blinking into the relative silence. “And that’s strange, considering.”
Using his mailed hand to brace himself against the door, he slipped on the metal surface, fell, and had to try again with the other. When he’d gotten to his feet, he leaned heavily on the door, his hand with the ribbon device held away from him like it was contaminated.
“Sha’re,” he blurted suddenly and nodded. “Yes. She was able to speak when Amaunet was dormant…” His voice trailed away as he shook his head. “But you aren’t pregnant, Dr. Jackson. So what makes you so special?” He realized belatedly that the question was directed as much at the Goa’uld in his head as it was at himself. The idea that the snake might answer threatened thrashing again, but he breathed hard through his nose and stared at a spot on the far wall until the panic settled into reasonably manageable background noise.
He could feel Sebek. There was a coiling at the base of his skull, not a physical sensation, really, but something like bad news coming, a dark, heavy, cold-water tension. Having a Goa’uld in his head, it turned out, felt an awful lot like dread. On that bizarre level where Daniel spent more time than was strictly healthy these days, that was comforting. He’d had lots of practice dealing with dread. And it wasn’t like Sebek was the first house-guest who’d arrived uninvited and refused to leave. One snake couldn’t be that much more horrible than the voices of Ma’chello’s ghostly-schizo Goa’uld-crazymaker. Of course, the Linvris had never really been there. Now, Daniel was awake, and Sebek was definitely there.
“Why do I always have to do the pep talks?” he wondered aloud. “I’m clearly very, very bad at them.”
As he stood there for what felt like a long time, long enough for his tailbone to get sore from leaning against the door, it occurred to him that he didn’t seem to be running away, even though running away, maybe finding his team and springing them from detention and going home and getting the snake out of his head all seemed to be a good plan on the face of it. He rubbed his hand across his mouth and stood there in the vault, realizing eventually that he was pretty much waiting for the Jaffa to come and haul him off to jail. That’s how it went, wasn’t it? SG-1 either got away or thrown in jail. Daniel had obviously not gotten away. But there were no Jaffa, because Sebek had dismissed them. The dread at the base of his skull seemed to draw itself up, uncoiling and humming like a high-voltage wire. Power. His own spine straightened with it. Assurance.
Of course the Jaffa wouldn’t arrest him. They wouldn’t do a damn thing to him.
He was their god.
The thought felt good, and the good feeling made him sick again, but the plan seemed a little more manageable. He could simply order his team’s release. Nobody was going to question their god. And that thrumming in his spine that was Sebek and his arrogance, he could take advantage of that. He could play Goa’uld.
He stood, unmoving, in the vault.
His neck itched. Absently, he fingered the scrapes and cuts he’d left with his fingernails. His hand came away flaked with dried blood, but there were no scrapes or cuts anymore.
It was this that tipped him off the edge of himself. Sebek was under the skin. His tusked head was buried in Daniel’s brainstem. The snake’s body, infinitely divided into finer and finer ganglia, insinuated itself into every function, controlled every secretion and every prickling of nerves. He was everywhere. What was left was this small, floating island called Daniel. Under the surface, Sebek was Leviathan, dark-backed and looming, waiting. And Daniel found himself staring down into the depths. Rubbing his fingers together, feeling the disintegrating flakes of his own dried blood, Daniel felt the elegant, sinuous power of it, of this thing that could smooth away the evidence of Daniel’s panic, just like that, the control it represented, the absolute awareness and engrossment. Unlike Daniel, who daily skirted the edges of what his own mind refused to show him, Sebek had no subconscious. Everything was surface in him, exposed. And it was so close, Daniel could feel Sebek inside.
The dark shape rose up under him, and with it came eons of memory, like a cold current lifting darkness into the light. Run away, he thought. Play Goa’uld. He stood still and stared into the rising shadow under his feet. Answers, thousands of years there, just there. Weaknesses. Failures. Strategies. Hatred. Desire. More, more, more. The generations of Sebek’s line flung themselves into the future, carried themselves forward in the DNA, remembering what they wanted, what had been unfulfilled, each one hungrier than the last, every disappointment tabulated, every revenge calculated. Daniel clutched at his stomach as Sebek’s desire coursed along nerve endings, became a hollowness in Daniel’s body. Don’t look, Daniel said, and kept looking. Sebek was a pure desire. He was pure focus. Pure. He was beautiful.
Daniel’s fingers were numb… and then they weren’t. Sebek was inside, in the blood. All the answers to all the questions Daniel had ever asked were in the blood.
He stood in the vault and didn’t run away.
He could smell flowers. Cloying and sweet, the scent was sharpened by Sebek’s attention, filled up all the space around them. Don’t go there. Daniel turned away, but it was everywhere. Desire smelled like flowers, was curled at the edges, brown, floating downward. The memory was a translucent scrim stretched taut over nothingness. But it wasn’t nothingness. It was his death, but it was impossible because no one could remember his own death, no one except, maybe, the members of SG-1, and Daniel had a few to choose from and this one in particular was as compelling as it was terrifying. He was suspended between horror and fascination, and he could feel Sebek inside. Beyond the ripe-rot smell of it, his time among the ascended was blank. Except that Sebek, with his pure desire and absolute control, had touched it, and it had spoken to him; it was in Sebek’s memory. Some attenuated version of Daniel’s Ancient memory was folded into Sebek’s somehow; Daniel could see it, obliquely, like he was looking at his own reflection in someone else’s eye. Disoriented, Daniel clutched at the wall, the gold caps on his fingers rattling against the script. No, he thought and closed his eyes tightly. But he didn’t look away. The Leviathan yawned open and swallowed him.
When Sebek opened Daniel’s eyes again, he was on the floor, head on his knees. He was tapping his capped thumb and forefinger together in an uneven staccato that matched his heartbeat. After awhile, both slowed and steadied to an even rhythm.
He lifted his head and craned his neck to look up at the door.
“We require Jack O’Neill,” Sebek said.
CHAPTER SIX
The crazy thing about Goa’uld holding cells was how cold they always were. With his eyes closed, Jack could conjure the memory of being held prisoner on Apophis’ ship, headed for Earth. The floor was as unforgiving here as it had been there. His tailbone was starting to ache.
Once, Daniel had said he thought the snakes made the cells cold on purpose—a kind of mental torture, a subtle thing to set their prisoners on edge. As psychological torture went, Jack could think of a dozen things that might have been more effective, and half of them he hadn’t had to leave Earth to learn about first hand.
Daniel’s comment always stuck with him, though. Especially now, when Daniel wasn’t around to say it again. So many things Daniel had repeated a hundred times over the years, from bad puns to information dumps. Jack had gone through stages with it—annoyance, resigned expectation, acceptance—and then Daniel had ascended, and Jack had realized he’d taken it for granted that Daniel would be around to annoy him forever. Daniel always did have a hard time dying.
With a grunt. J
ack shifted and turned on his side. He folded his arm beneath his head, but the hard floor bit into his hip. Teal’c had taken last watch, but that was a formality, since neither of them had slept much. In Teal’c’s case, he was still having some trouble adjusting to the act of sleeping, and in a strange place he had a tendency to meditate instead. Jack wished he could teach Teal’c the art of dropping into a light doze whenever the opportunity arose, but he wasn’t having such great luck with that himself. Some role model he was. Besides, Teal’c had over one hundred years of habit to unlearn, and his brain trumped his body.
Or maybe it was more than that. Whenever Jack closed his eyes, he could feel something pushing at his consciousness—and whatever it was, he didn’t want it coming in. Carter had been tossing and turning since she’d bedded down, and Jack had no desire to join her in dreamland. Even when he was wide awake, there were things running through his head that he was having trouble clamping down on. For all his internal grumbling about the cold, it was warmth he shied away from when he closed his eyes. The light there in that place between real things and dreams was mellow and golden, and beyond that was a whole lot of pain.
He didn’t remember all of what had happened to him in Ba’al’s fortress, but his body remembered the light, the warmth of the place, and the gentleness of that feeling was the definition of cruel joke. His conscious mind didn’t remember, but he knew. Ba’al was Goa’uld, and Kanan was Tok’ra, but it was a difference in degree, and not much degree at that. The tiny cell in Ba’al’s fortress had been a bigger version of Jack’s own body. Trapped was trapped was trapped, but although he was a sadistic son of a bitch, at least Ba’al was honest, and his prison had had a door.
Jack pulled up his legs to ease the small of his back and concentrated on the cold.
He’d been sick, mostly absent, when he’d been hijacked. Daniel wasn’t absent at all. Knowing Daniel, he was front and center, talking himself hoarse—or whatever the silent in-the-head equivalent was—the way Jack knew he himself had beat his fists raw against the cage of his own bones, in the memory of Kanan he couldn’t quite reach. Jack didn’t feel a bit sorry for Sebek.
With a growling sort of sigh, Jack sat up and opened his eyes. This cell, if anything, seemed even smaller than the spaces inside his head. He stretched out his arms, making space, and considered pacing, but that wouldn’t do anything but tell him exactly how much space he didn’t have. Teal’c turned to meet his eyes, a question there, but Jack shook his head. When Carter woke up, she’d make it her business to tear everything down and examine every part of the dreams he wasn’t having. It was all about the clues. The cell was like every cell they’d ever been in. The clues were in their heads. Carter would make diagrams. He could already picture her, hunched over her laptop, categorizing ghosts. Teal’c, though, simply nodded and closed his eyes.
The fourth occupant of the cell hadn’t slept either, as far as Jack could tell. The boy hadn’t moved, but he was as tense and wary as he had been when he was brought in. Although his head was down, his posture was a dead giveaway, and Jack wasn’t at all surprised that he didn’t trust them, despite his knowledge of who they were. Like father, like son.
The kid looked like he hadn’t eaten a square meal in weeks. His hands were too big for his narrow frame, awkward-looking even as they clutched his elbows. Adolescent. He was gawky, bigger than he seemed, and probably bigger than he realized. Jack guessed that the kid would stand taller than Carter if he ever straightened his spine. He should have been playing kid games, growing out of his clothes and making the girls gawk. Instead, his fingers moved restlessly across his flaky skin, and his breath wheezed a little in his chest, while he curled his toes under and tried not to take up space. Suddenly, the room seemed even smaller.
Looking at the kid, at the slouch of his shoulders and the pale grey of his skin—the way the kid was thwarted, closed down, shrunken muscles, collapsed potential—Jack knew why Aris had no qualms about offering up Daniel, or any of them, as sacrifice for his son’s life. He was pretty sure Daniel wouldn’t have had any qualms offering up his own life, if he’d known. But that wasn’t the point.
Jack squeezed the pockets of his pants, looking for a power bar. Aris had left them with whatever food they were carrying, not out of kindness, but out of practicality. It wasn’t much, anyway. He drew the last one out of his pocket and tossed it to Teal’c, then nodded toward the kid. Teal’c inclined his head.
“Young man,” Teal’c said. The boy twitched at the sound of Teal’c’s voice, but didn’t look up. “You must eat something.”
“They only feed us once a day,” the boy answered, his voice muffled through his arms.
Teal’c tore open the wrapper and held it out toward the boy. “Take this.”
The kid lifted his head and zeroed in on the power bar. His nostrils flared, and his fist opened involuntarily. Jack frowned. He’d been that hungry—more so—at least once. And just as proud, too. The boy’s gaze shifted to Jack, assessing.
As if it was of no concern to him at all, Jack lay back down and stared at the ceiling. “We don’t need it,” he said. A moment later, he heard the crinkle of paper as the bar was ripped out of its wrapping. One small victory.
In the silence that followed, Jack ran back through all the scenarios he’d been building in his head over the course of the short night. Option A: they’d overpower the guards. So far they’d been spectacularly unsuccessful so far in every attempt they’d made. To get to Daniel, it’d take better luck than that. On the heels of option A came the big decision: to drag Daniel away with the snake still in him, try to make an escape and pray the Tok’ra could get it out, or… not.
It was the “not” part of the equation that was difficult. The snake was going to slow them down, and they might all die anyway. Jack kept taking that piece of the puzzle out, turning it over in his hands and feeling the shape of it; he kept looking at it until it didn’t cause him such immediate pain. Beside him, Carter groaned softly, her foot kicking out before she pulled her knees up, curling tightly. Teal’c watched the kid stuff the power bar into his mouth and swallow without even chewing. A faint smile made a crease at the side of Teal’c’s mouth.
If the snake had to be killed—and removal wasn’t an option—Jack would be the one to do it. Daniel was his responsibility. Carefully, he set that thought aside again. Limited exposure was all that made it bearable.
Jailbreak or no jailbreak, they had to deal with Aris; with his son at stake, he wasn’t going to be giving them any unexpected breaks. Not like last time.
Too many variables. Math always did make his head hurt.
Jack turned his head so he could see Teal’c and the kid. Teal’c had moved closer, and the boy was unfolding by degrees, a little less cautious in their presence.
“How long have you been a prisoner in this place?” Teal’c asked.
The boy shrugged and glanced at the door, then back at Teal’c. “They don’t like prisoners to talk. But you know that already,” he added, gaze fixed on the golden tattoo on Teal’c’s forehead.
“Yes.” Teal’c sat down beside him, with his back to the wall. “But we will hear them approaching.”
“They sneak up, sometimes,” the boy said. Jack wondered when Jaffa had become stealthy, or if that was a new trick they’d added to their repertoire under this particular snake.
“Then we will be cautious.” Teal’c’s expression was gentle, but Jack knew half of his attention was focused on listening for anyone in the corridor. “Where did they keep you before bringing you here?”
“Why do you care?” The boy folded the power bar wrapper carefully against his knees, making it smaller and smaller. When he couldn’t fold it any more, he closed his hand around it like he was afraid Teal’c would snatch it away. When he looked at Teal’c, his expression dared Teal’c to try.
“We must make a plan of escape,” Teal’c said, which was more than Jack would have told him. After all, it was Aris Boch’s kid; Bu
t Teal’c knew what he was doing.
Another shrug from the kid. “That’s your business.”
“We would not leave you here,” Teal’c began, but the boy was shaking his head.
“They’re coming.”
Jack looked at Teal’c, who gave a curt nod of confirmation. “Jaffa approach.”
“I wish I could do that,” Jack muttered. He still didn’t hear anything. He reached over and shook Carter’s shoulder once, twice, until she sat bolt upright, ready to swing. “Easy, tiger,” he said. “Time to put on your fighting face.”
The wild-eyed look eased away after a moment, and she combed her hands through her messy hair. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “Bad dreams.”
“I figured,” he said, getting to his feet. He gave her a hand up.
She jerked her head around to glance at the boy, then asked, “How’s… ?”
“He and Teal’c’ve been getting acquainted.”
“Well, that’s good,” Carter said, and began patting down her pockets. Jack waved her hands away.
“Thought of that already.”
“Oh.” She squared up her shoulders. She looked like she hadn’t slept a wink. Plus, she’d puked up the last thing she’d eaten. Jack noticed the tremor in her hands before she caught him looking and put her hands in her pockets.